life after loss 97
commiserate, you counsel, you try to enlighten
police officers and village elders, you visit com-
munity forums to explain that bullying a new
widow into giving over her family property is
prohibited even when the bullies are her own in-
laws. “People were in shock—‘Oh my God, this
is actually wrong?’” said a lawyer named Nina
Asiimwe, recalling the first public talks she gave
after joining other Ugandan professionals in the
Kampala office of International Justice Mission
(IJM), the organization that employs Angwech.
“They thought it was normal. An injustice, but
normal. OK’d by society.”
Think of these Ugandans as a widows’ defense
brigade: attorneys, social workers, and criminal
investigators using their nation’s own justice
system to undo long-held assumptions about
women who have lost their husbands. IJM is a
U.S.-based nonprofit that supports legal advoca-
cy in other countries for impoverished victims of
violent abuse, and in one sense the agenda of its
employees in Kampala is modest. They operate a
pilot program, within one large, mostly rural dis-
trict east of the capital, that provides free lawyers
and caseworkers for victims of a crime known
throughout eastern and southern Africa as “prop-
erty grabbing”—extorting vulnerable people, by
verbal threats or physical attacks, into giving up
possession of land that is rightfully theirs.
For reasons both ancient and modern, wid-
owed women are the most frequent victims of
property grabbing in this region of the world.
More than two-thirds of Uganda’s 39 million
people raise at least some of their own food, and
holding title to one’s own home and attached land
remains a powerful assurance of material security:
meals for the children, firewood for cooking,
crops to sell at market. Because graves are often
placed near the home, the person in charge of the
family property also possesses ancestral history,
honor, status. And the rapid growth of Uganda’s
population, along with the arrival of mortgage
banking, are pushing up the value of land. A
house and the cropland around it now constitute
potential loan collateral for business investments
or the accumulation of more land.
These are things traditional Ugandan culture
does not easily concede to a widow. The con-
stitution, rewritten in 1995 and a source of na-
tional pride, promises gender equality. Modern
statutes explicitly extend inheritance rights
to wives and female children. But in practice,
especially in the rural areas that make up most of
Uganda, it’s still widely assumed that only men
should own or inherit land, that widowhood ter-
minates a woman’s social legitimacy, and that
it’s up to her husband’s family and clan to decide
what happens next—who will take the proper-
ty, who will take the children, who will have sex
with her now. “Plus the stigma,” Asiimwe said. “If
you’re a widow, bad luck. You’re cursed. You’re
blamed for the death of your spouse. It could be
that he had several homes, several wives, that he
brought HIV into the house. But when he dies, it’s
you. You killed him.”
So with widows as their clients, IJM advocates
in the villages and courtrooms of Uganda’s Muko-
no District have an audacious goal: to broadcast
across Mukono, and perhaps throughout Uganda
and beyond, the idea that seizing these women’s
homes and crops—as well as the assaults, threats,
forgeries, and verbal abuse this often entails—is
not only wrong but punishable by the courts.
Diplomacy is crucial; in village meetings Asiimwe
always addresses her elders as “my fathers” and
“my mothers.” She tells them she knows widow
abuse is typically treated as a family dispute to
be worked out among clan leaders or by village
councils, whose elected heads command respect.
But their efforts are often inadequate, she
The Ugandan widow
was told that her children
belonged to her late
husband’s family, that
her home and crops were
no longer hers, and that
she would become her
brother-in-law’s third wife.